


Gruesome Attractions

by Goodknight



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Camping, Cannibalism, Dirty Talk, Emotional Constipation, M/M, Marriage, Murder, Non-Explicit Sex, Self-Harm, Self-Mutilation, real love, serial killer au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 13:35:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8374099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goodknight/pseuds/Goodknight
Summary: Hux and Kylo go on a cross-country couples get-away.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Another horrorific fic for the Hallowe'en season :) I think this pairing brings out the worst in me! I've put the explicit rating on just because this one teeters on the edge, I think. It's the ~steamiest~ fic I've ever written which is.. embarrassing, actually. :I Hope you enjoy the read, anyway!

'What?' Hux snapped, looking up from his cutting board.  
  
Kylo's long body was draped bonelessly over the couch. He tilted his head back over the armrest. 'I didn't say anything.'  
  
Hux sneered. 'No.' He brought his knife down with a bang. Trimming the fat. 'But you're breathing like an asthmatic.'  
  
'It's called sighing.'  
  
'I know what it's called. Cut it out.'  
  
Kylo curled himself up, tucking his head into the gap between the couch cushions. Hux's iPod was docked on the kitchen counter: violins swelled, a cello moaned. Kylo sighed.  
  
'You did this to yourself.' Hux said, lifting the slabs of meat with gloved hands. Fluid spread across the cutting board, slicked his latex fingers. 'We would have stayed comfortably at home, if you had even the slightest self control.'  
  
'He literally asked for it.'  
  
'It was foolish.'  
  
Kylo clenched and unclenched and clenched his fists. His newly dyed black hair was starting to curl at the ends, drying against his black t-shirt, swinging forward over his wet eyes when he bowed his head. 'Why don't you have a new identity?' He asked, as Hux packed the meat in the cooler.  
  
'Because I never killed anyone.'

* * *

  
  
Kylo chewed the steak slowly, like the meat was tough. It wasn't - Kylo was a very good cook. 'I can't' He said, thickly, 'eat this.'  
  
Hux put his plate on top of the cooler next to their tent, as Kylo spit his mouthful out onto the dirt. 'I'll have it for lunch.'  
  
Kylo took a shuddering breath. 'Fine.'  
  
Their fire crackled as Kylo distracted himself poking it, making sparks fly and logs crumble. Hux leant back in his fold-out chair, ankles crossed on a low, thick stump. He cut his steak into uniform squares.  
  
'I'll get marshmallows.' Kylo grumbled, looking away from the dark spaces between the trees to watch Hux close his mouth around his fork.  
  
Hux chewed. Swallowed. 'I bought you a chocolate bar and some honey grahams.' He said.  
  
Kylo didn't answer. His face was slack. He ambled around the campsite like a daydreaming child, pawing through Hux's suitcase, collecting things in his arms. Hux was tempted to remind him again that all this was Kylo's fault, no one else's, and especially not Hux's, but Kylo's dull, haunted eyes spoke volumes for the fact that Kylo was fiercely aware of his guilt. Wisest not to poke the dog's sensitive underbelly, when he shows it to you.  
  
'I drew us a map.' Hux said, while Kylo singed marshmallows in the fire.  
  
'Are we going south? I want to see an alligator.'  
  
'If you wanted to go on vacation, you should have let your father yell at you like a normal emotionally maladjusted man, instead of killing him like a violent, deranged one. And then booked a vacation, similarly. Have you forgotten that we are on the run?'  
  
Kylo looked at Hux's chewing mouth. 'Don't tell me you don't like it.' He said. 'I bet you love every bit of this.'  
  
'I've never liked camping, and I resent your forcing me into hiding with you.'  
  
'But you like everything else. You like seeing me suffer.'  
  
Hux accepted a crisp, black marshmallow from Kylo and squished it between two graham crackers. 'The steak was excellent.' He agreed. 'Meat killed instantly... surprised meat, meat that doesn't know it's meat when it's dying...'  
  
Kylo held his s'more aloft in his long fingers and looked back out into the woods, lower lip pouting and shiny with spit. 'I don't want to talk about that.' He said.

* * *

  
Hux drove with one hand on the wheel, the other holding half of the sandwich Kylo had made that morning while he packed up their campsite - Foccacia, ground chiles, provolone, and the meat soaked with olive oil. Each bite was exotic and powerful.  
  
'We'll hunt something for supper.' Hux told Kylo, as they drove past the McDonalds.

'Doesn't being on the run mean laying low?' Kylo grumbled over the radio static.

'I think I deserve it, what with the trouble you're putting me through.'

* * *

Kylo wiped his cheeks with baby oil and toilet paper in a port-a-potty at a gas station on the side of the highway, streaking red and Gobi. His face was a blood moon. He didn't know who he was - Ben had had moles. Kylo bent over the sink and scrubbed at himself with his hands, scooping water, splashing, washing away the blood and the makeup. Now he had moles. Ben had had blonde hair, shaggy beach surfer hair that fell oddly over his black eyes and sallow skin, hair like his father's. Now no one had hair like Han Solo - not Han Solo, not Ben; Kylo had black hair.  
  
Hux was waiting outside with his arms crossed. He smelt like tabacco and he was holding a brown bag of whiskey and some black liquorice for Kylo.  
  
They stopped at the side of a rushing river, where they burnt their catch's clothes.  
  
Kylo beat the tent pegs into the soil while the meat marinated. He grilled it with asparagus, feeding black liquorice into his mouth like he had an oral fixation, and threw the candy bag into the river, where it was buffeted by the water and thrown onto the rocks until it washed away.  
  
Lemon, pepper, thyme. Usually, Kylo ate it. He didn't get the same thrill Hux obviously did, could have eaten beef or pork or chicken or moose and felt just the same.  
  
'I suspect your father had a better diet than this one.' Hux teased, watching Kylo push his food around his plate with a malicious twinkle.  
  
Kylo ground his teeth. 'He was a pescatarian.'

* * *

  
Kylo kept a jar. Otherwise, he was a man of few possessions, few attachments. The jar was very personal to him, very important. It was spiritually vital. Religious.  
  
Hux touched his cigarette to the lighter, one hand on the wheel, red sunrise catching the tips of his hair as they drove through the desert. They were dipping South before shooting North straight as the crow flies. Sometimes Kylo wondered if Hux humoured him because they were secretly in real love.  
  
'Have you kept anything else?' Hux spat, glancing a moment at Kylo's jar.  
  
Kylo looked back at him, slack jawed. He had wedged the jar between his knees. It was a jam jar. Some of the old label was still clinging to it, his grandmother's writing. Quince 1987. 'You said you wanted the skull.'  
  
Hux took a slow drag. 'I did say that.'  
  
'Yes. You did.'  
  
Hux hated admitting his weaknesses, his moments of emotion, of passionate feeling. Kylo was the sentimental one. Kylo was the one with a fucking jar of his victims' ashes. 'Where is it?'

  
Kylo bent down and reached into the darkness at his feet. 'I don't know why you wanted my father's skull.'  
  
'I don't.'  
  
'That's not what you said when we were dismembering him.'  
  
'Keeping souvenirs is foolish and impractical.'  
  
Kylo put the skull on his jittery, bouncing thigh, like a parent would an infant. 'Maybe you should have thought of that.' He said. 'Before we brought it camping with us.'

* * *

  
  
They saw an alligator lounging at the edge of a river. They saw several turtles, and a cluster of brown monkeys.  
  
The heat was a physicality, making them slow and complacent. Hux walked barefoot at the lakeside and watched boats skip through the water while Kylo sat on a towel and drank a caesar, keeping his head down.  
  
Sometimes it was like a vacation. In the cold night, Kylo wrapped his leg around Hux, holding him down, and snored while Hux listened to the rain beat the Earth. They drank coffee under the pink dawn in the morning, and drove on the white sand with the ocean in their nostrils until the tide came in.  
  
Kylo's roots started to show.

* * *

  
  
They drove through the Northern Florida bottleneck and checked into a motel in Georgia (as the single Mr Dimitrov), to dye Kylo's hair.  
  
Hux pushed Kylo over the lip of the bath tub. A dead fly was stuck to the yellow acrylic. When Hux twisted the plastic taps, nothing came out.  
  
'We should have paid for the nicer hotel.' Kylo said. Hux had rolled up his sleeves so he wouldn't get his shirt wet. Even after months in the Florida sun, his forearms were blanched.  
  
'I'll pick up bottled water from the gas station.'  
  
'And a sausage pizza.'  
  
Hux scowled. 'I won't go out of my way.'

* * *

  
They lay side by side on the hotel bed, Kylo dripping blackish water on his one flat pillow through the towel Hux had knotted around his head, a pizza box and a carton of breadsticks open between them. Frankenstein was playing in black and white on the TV.  
  
'A lot of convicts go to Mexico.' Kylo drawled.  
  
'Did you see that on the crime channel?'  
  
'They can't follow you over the border.'  
  
'No one is following us.'  
  
Kylo shifted and took a breadstick. 'How long before they connect all the murders? How long before you're dying _your_ hair black?'  
  
'Never.' Hux snapped.  
  
'You're confident, for a guilty man.'  
  
The television flashed black and white; static screamed. It was a very bad motel. Hux had insisted on stripping it before they settled down, had put down his own bedding - dragged in from the back of the car - with a hard look on his face, a struggling look, like: he was military, he was not soft-minded, but God, he could not suffer dirty mattresses. And there had been a loaded gun between the springboard and the pillow-top when they'd lifted it; a relic from some previous tenant. Kylo had wanted to take it as a souvenir, but Hux had slapped him before he could touch. It lay beneath them still, like the pea in the fairytale.   
  
The meat cooler was under the tv set. They never kept more than what fit in the cooler, nestled between three bags of ice. Better not to have more than a day or two's worth of the meat, in case they were searched.  
  
Hux had had a fantasy where he was the apex predator, a lone wolf among human sheep, for a long time.   
  
The first time Kylo spent the night at his home, after their third date, he'd made breakfast in the morning - egg folded in thick cut tomatoees and spiced sausage, chiles and a cup of strong coffee. The fantasy changed, as Hux watched him peel bacon strips with his bare hands. Abruptly, Hux wanted to lean against his marble counter tops with a tumbler in his palm, watching an obedient Kylo sear someone in the frying pan, fat spitting onto the stovetop and hissing at Kylo's broad chest. He wanted to see Kylo forearm deep in bloody torso pulp.   
  
Kylo made a damn good omelette.  
  
~~~~

* * *

  
They stopped at Seneca Creek to bury Han Solo's skull.

Kylo's sparse facebook had two movies liked: The Blair Witch Project, which had been filmed between the trees in Maryland, and Moulin Rouge, which was less likely to be cited by the media as evidence of Kylo's predisposition to violence and acts of horror.  
  
Hux watched Kylo wipe dirt off on his jeans. Kylo's face was frozen in religious rapture - his father's remains had fit into the Earth and seamlessly disappeared, and now it was as though Han had never been. There was not even a supernatural whisper in the trees, or an eerie silence. All was right around them.  
  
Hux doubted Kylo knew where The Blair Witch Project had been filmed.

* * *

  
Colours swirled on the streets in Philadelphia, yellow and black striped road closed signs and pushing people holding bright umbrellas. Beyond them, the parade of mummers. Kylo was slumped against the window, a dry shadow on a backdrop of heavy rain.  
  
'Why don't we pick up a bottle of champagne?' Hux asked, creeping the car past a crossing guard.  
  
'Are you in the mood for celebrating?' Kylo retorted, always with an accusatory tone, always pushing back like waves at a cliff-face.  
  
'I am, actually.'  
  
Kylo straightened, shuffling in his big black coat. 'Fine.'  
  
They ended up very lost - diverted and shuffled by the movements of dancers, actors, singers, and earlybird drunks. Hux scowled at them with no small amount of jealousy - being in a car with Kylo for over four hours, while Kylo sighed self deprecatingly about burying his father, had given him a sharp craving for a stiff drink.  
  
The motel overlooked a dark section of city street, and Kylo quickly pulled the drapes.  
  
'This would have been a good time to go hunting.' Hux said, his breath at Kylo's ear.  
  
'I could still go.'  
  
Kylo's body was limp, like defeat. Hux didn't like being on the run, either. 'Don't bother.' He said, and bit Kylo's ear, softly, tugging and releasing and then moving to the skin behind it. Kylo had never been afraid of him - he tilted his head with a look of profound, schooled boredom, colour high on his prominent cheekbones. But, then again, Hux had never feared Kylo either, for all the breaths he'd choked from the mouths of his victims, for all the bodies he'd brutalised with carving knives, the innards he'd brought home to Hux like a cat slaying mice for its master. 'I've always wanted to taste you.' Hux said, not for the first time.  
  
Kylo licked his lips. 'Really?'  
  
'Yes.'  
  
'How...' Hux watched Kylo's throat move as he paused to swallow, 'Tell me what you would do.'  
  
Hux had thought of several things he might want to do - he always did like to have options. Sometimes he told Kylo that he could get on his knees, could have Kylo hard and wanting, make him beg for Hux to swallow his cock, could make him come with Hux's teeth around him like an animal with its leg in a snare trap. " _You would_ scream _for me",_ he sometimes growled, while Kylo panted his agreement, " _you don't need your dick anyway_." Other times, Hux scraped at Kylo's fingertips with his front teeth, clutching harshly at his wrists as though to keep him still, while Kyo watched lustily. " _If you had no fingertips_ ," Hux would tease, " _you wouldn't need to wear gloves."_  
  
Kylo cleared his throat with a wretched scratching sound as Hux deliberated, the flat of his tongue against Kylo's neck. His hands had crept onto Kylo's stomach, to hold him. 'I could do anything to you.' Hux decided, and Kylo's eyebrow twitched. 'You would not stop moaning if I chewed your lips to mincemeat. Would you?' Hux pulled at Kylo's body so he rocked off-balance and stumbled into him; broad, lithe, and reluctantly giving. 'Would you, Ben?'  
  
Kylo's dark eyes were fixed on the armchair in the corner of the room. He was an awkward lover.  
  
'You're a pet, Ben.' Hux told him, mouthing along his jaw and finding his slack, wet mouth. His hands brushed down to the front of Kylo's jeans and stayed there, teasing. 'Now, I think it's time the champagne was opened.' He patted Kylo and stepped away towards the brown bag on the desk.  
  
Kylo clenched and unclenched his fists. Someone was shouting outside. Hux pointed the champagne bottle at the popcorn ceiling and uncorked it with a bang!, moving his thumb over the opening to stop the spray. 'Are you having a glass?'  
  
'Yes.'  
  
Hux poured them each a mug of champagne at the complimentary coffee station near the door. 'Since we have no-one else for dinner, I really was hoping you'd put out,' he joked, pressing the mug into Kylo's palm. 'I'm starving.'

* * *

  
They owned seven surgical knives. Kylo stared at the blank faced man in the bathroom mirror and wondered which part of him to sacrifice to the redheaded God drinking Laurent-Perrier outside the door. He was still hard. The spot where Hux's spit had been was colder than the rest of him.  
  
He picked up a knife, leant over the sink basin, and touched the blade against the phantom of Hux's lower lip.

* * *

 

'I can do the fingertips, too.'  
  
Hux had put the ear Kylo had severed from his own hideous head in a plastic bag in the meat cooler. 'You maimed yourself.' He said, unable to keep the dark tone of happy surprise out of his voice.  
  
Kylo opened his mouth a little, testing the elasticity. The New Year had come and gone. Hux had let himself into the bathroom when Kylo fell against the baseboard with a thump and a broken sob, and pressed the motel's towels to the wound on the side of his face with a hungry glee. He'd kissed him, too, down the neck where the blood was dripping, closed mouthed, keeping his clean shirt angled well away from the mess Kylo had made of his cheek.  
  
They were waiting, now, for the blood to stop. Hux had a hand on Kylo's chest to keep him from drowsily drooping. 'I'm not so delicate as that,' Kylo muttered, when Hux looped his fingers in Kylo's matted hair, possessive and soothing. 'I can handle the pain.'  
  
Hux hummed and dropped his hand to Kylo's crotch. 'I know.'

* * *

  
  
Kylo wore his winter jacket and large knit scarf to their wedding. Hux was in his most collegiate sweater and brown loafers. Both having refused to walk down the aisle, they approached each other venemously from opposite sides of the room.  
  
Hux had memorised the usual vows, and Kylo opted to say nothing but 'I do' at the end, and to nod tightly like he was being interrogated. Their hired minister asked the empty room if it had any objections, chuckled to himself while Kylo pulled at his scarf nervously, and they exchanged pawn shop rings and kissed chastely.  
  
Hux had no doubt the minister would remember them. Kylo's head was still wrapped in gauze, and his eyes were dull with painkiller. He'd slashed himself like he was trying to cut out his entire face just the night before, and he'd knocked down a vase with his grandiose gesturing when the secretary at the front-end of Same-Day-Same-Love riled him up asking if their families were unsupportive.  
  
'Spouses cannot be made to testify against each other.' Hux had told Kylo in the early morning, sitting at the foot of the bed with a cup of coffee, flipping through the phone book for the address to their wedding.   
  
Kylo had slept fitfully on his uninjured side that night, propped up on all the pillows, tormented by fits of delirious muttering. Hux had jerked off on him and then moved to the desk to read and finish the champagne bottle.  
  
'That doesn't sound practical.' Kylo said, after a pause, his voice slow.  
  
'It doesn't matter how it sounds to you.' Hux answered. 'We should have married a long time ago.'  
  
They spent their honeymoon driving to New York.

* * *

  
  
'My husband will have a honeycrueller.'  
  
Kylo was glaring intensely at the cafe cashier, hands in his pockets.  
  
'Where are you guys visiting from?' She asked.  
  
'California. We're here for the theatre.' Hux lied.  
  
They slipped back into the crowd, two bobbing heads over the sea of grey faces.

Hux felt distinctly watched. HE had seen the police cruiser outside slide up the curb behind them when they left the cafe, so when they were cut off by flashing red and blue lights at the intersection outside, he had already raised his hands.  
  
Kylo looked at him sidelong, furious. He ran.

* * *

  
  
  
Kylo had called from his apartment, the night of Han's death. 'I require your assistance.' He had breathed into the phone, 'Immediately.'  
  
'Has it yet to sink in that I have obligations outside of your personal sphere of influence?' Hux had asked.  
  
'I don't care.' Kylo had sneered. He was standing over his father's body, holding the phone in his clean hand. The other hung careless at his side, against the splash and smear of blood on his jeans. 'This is more important.'  
  
It was a fourty minute drive from Hux's home in Brodhurst Lake in the western foothills to Kylo's on the south side of the city. Kylo must have intended to stand with his eye pressed into the peephole the entire time, because when Hux raised his fist to knock twenty minutes after hanging up the phone and speeding down the empty early morning highways, Kylo opened it first, looking disturbed as usual.  
  
Hux saw the blood on the carpet first. It had seeped from behind the couch in a lazy, pooling river. Kylo had tracked it in two neat backwards footsteps and then carried it with him from the living room to the entryway. His one arm was caked with blood and starting to crack; his clothes shone brilliantly with wetness.  
  
In all their time together, Kylo had never acted alone. Hux chose the victim, the time, the method, the clean-up. He had expected this, eventually, though. Kylo was a difficult creature to control, volatile and driven by cruelest instinct.   
  
'Well?' Hux snapped, when Kylo had bolted the door behind him. 'Where is your detergent?'  
  
'Under the sink, obviously.' His black eyes were alight with the odd mad fire of dormant blood lust, cruel possibility. It was an inappropriate time to be hard, maybe, but as they stared each other down on the threshold, Hux had been.  
  
'I'm wondering, then, why you haven't started cleaning.' Hux had skirted Kylo to look at the body behind the couch, hands clasped behind his back, ready to be angry at Kylo for doing this in his own home without Hux' permission and without any apparent thought or care for their system, and then met Han's open eyes.  
  
'He came unannounced.' Kylo had said, behind him. 'He told me it was killing him to see me waste my potential like this.'  
  
'I underestimated your sense of humour.'  
  
'He was being threatening.'  
  
'I doubt that very much.'  
  
Kneeling on Kylo's floor, the red sunrise winking through the cracks in the blackout curtains, scrubbing the carpet with a steel brush, was the first time Hux had contemplated framing Kylo for everything. The fantasy of living symbiotically shattered when Kylo cried - silently, behind the curtain of his sandy hair - when Hux draped trash-bags over his father's face.  
  
He had wanted to keep Kylo forever. He might even have given up the hunt in exchange for peaceful, shared retirement some years down the line.  
  
But Ben Solo had needed to dump the body and run.  
  
  
~~~~

* * *

They weren't allowed to talk to each other. Hux knew Kylo had been brought down eventually, after jumping a fence into someone's backyard and slicing a police officer in two with his switchblade. It didn't matter that they match their stories, anyway. Hux knew Kylo would never talk except to make himself look more violent, more suspicious.  
  
Still, it was the first time in a long time he'd had no alternative course of action - just a handful of stupid, last minute preparations to give him an unstable leg to stand on in court when he pled ignorance of his husband's trysts - the skull in the woods, the sloppily discarded body in the river that would serve to connect Kylo's crime of passion to the other, less thoughtless, unsolved murders in their hometown. Relying on Kylo's refusal to accept or cooperate with authority and unwittingly take the fall for them both felt uncomfortably like trusting him. And _God_... it's not like Hux had actually killed anyone.

* * *

  
  
Why was your husband's ear in a cooler in the backseat?  
  
'Because he removed it.'  
  
Why would he do something like that?  
  
'He seemed disturbed.'  
  
And for how long did you suspect something was off about Mr. Solo?  
  
'Since our first meeting.'  
  
And yet you married him. Why leave your home so suddenly with a man you judged to be disturbed?

'Well, because we are in love, obviously.'

  
  
Were you acting alone?  
  
'I have nothing to say to you.'  
  
Was your husband aware of the reason for your sudden little road-trip, Mr Solo?  
  
'That is not for you to know.'  
  
Why take him with you, if he had no part in it? Why marry him, all of a sudden?  
  
'Because we're in love.'  
  
You're in love.  
  
'Yes. Real love. You wouldn't understand.'  
  
No, Mr Solo, I can't say I do. We found this in your husband's house. Do you recognise it?  
  
'No.'  
  
Really? Because it's one of eleven skulls we found in his wine cellar. Tell me, Mr Solo, which one of you is the big trophy collector?

**Author's Note:**

> Whew! Hux, we need to talk about the compulsive skull hoarding. haha. Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
